December (5 page)

                     
Anyway, it was just after
one o'clock, everybody buggering off for lunch, the pubs filling up, and I'm
perching on an amplifier, droning out 'Julia', feeling unusually ... wistful (I
can't get away from this bloody word 'wistful', but you know what I mean, kind
of coasting on memory, but nothing more complicated than that ... or so I
thought) and I remember looking down and seeing something glistening on the
curve of the guitar, just above the pick-up, a blob of liquid, and then another
one landed next to it.
                     
Plop.

                     
Well, of course, it was a
bloody tear, wasn't it?

                     
I was really embarrassed.
But at least it was Liverpool, where more tears have been shed into more pints
over that bastard ...

                     
Anyway, the feller who runs
the shop comes over - he'd been watching me, not saying a word. So when he sees
I've finally noticed him, he wanders across, big grin. 'Got to buy it now,
matey, you've christened the bugger. That'll be nine hundred and thirty five
quid, including discount.'

                     
I'm thinking, You
dickhead. Not him, me.

                     
Then the lights go out.

                     
Bang.

You're never going to send this,
pal. Might as well admit it. You're just tormenting yourself.

      
Dave was writing it on the card table in his old bedroom at Ma's
bungalow in Hoylake, on the Wirral, where the seagulls cruised past the window
and crapped on the glass.

      
Always used to stay here when he was working clubs and pubs in
Liverpool and the North West, even though it depressed the hell out of him.
Now, with the Jan thing on the blink, he was killing time, gearing up for a
final rescue bid.

      
In a situation like this, he always wrote to Moira, which was
as much use as writing to Santa Claus and sending it up the chimney, but must
be therapeutic because he was unloading it, like - presumably - spilling it all
to an analyst.

      
On the wall, directly facing him, was a reproachful picture of
the martyred John Lennon, going yellow now, like the adjacent poster from inside
the Beatles' White Album, which, twenty years ago he'd - presciently, no doubt
- had framed in black.
      
In fact, apart from his own artwork
for the first Philosopher's Stone album, the room was still the way it had been
when he was a student, back when the world was innocent. 'When you're famous,'
his ma used to say, 'I'll open it to the public at a fiver a time.'

      
Even she must be realising the prospect of Dave becoming famous
was about as likely now as the seagulls flying off to crap somewhere else.

      
The old girl had a man friend these days and went off on regular
'dates' in this feller's ancient Morris Oxford, sometimes staying out all night.
She was seventy.

      
Before Jan, Dave had lived for brief periods with four women,
all of whom had known about him or learned very quickly. (The sudden coldness
of the bedroom sometimes in the early hours, the way owls would always find
them, even in the city.) Initially they'd been excited by it. It was his bit of
charisma'
.
(Moira used to talk, quite cynically, about her 'glamour'.)
But it faded fast.

      
If he was ever to trap some happiness, it could only be with a
woman he couldn't frighten, and he'd only ever met one, and among her last
words to him had been the endlessly echoing

      
we're no gonny see each
other again, ever.

      
And she'd never replied to his letters.

I
mean
all
the lights went out.
Everywhere.

                     
Remember Dylan's line
about darkness at the break of noon. This one was just over an hour after noon,
but I'll get to that.

                     
Well, obviously, we
thought it was just the shop, at first. I said, 'You shouldn't keep waiting for
the red bill, Percy, sometimes they forget.' Then we go out into the street and
everybody's lights have gone, and I can hear this terrible screeching of brakes
from the main rood around the corner - I mean, not just one screech but a whole
chorus of screeches, and it's obvious what's happened - the bloody traffic
lights have all gone out.

                     
Well, I couldn't have bought
Percy's Takamine even if
 
I'd had the
money - the bloody till wouldn't work. So I walk out into the centre of town,
and it's like the end of the world's been announced.
                     
Some people are really
panicking -I mean, everybody's had a power cuts at home, maybe even the whole
street's been off ... but an entire city? Customers and office workers trapped in
lifts? Streets clogged with cars and buses and taxis? Trains frozen in
coal-black underground stations?

                     
This is not natural.

         
And it's dead eerie, somehow. Although
far from quiet, what with the streets full of police trying to get the traffic
flowing again, shops being locked in customers' faces because of the looting
threat.

                     
I remember this feller
banging on the door of a newsagent's shouting, Hey, come on, gissa packet a
ciggies, will yer? Just one packet, yer bastards!

                     
And there's a woman rushing
out of a hairdresser's with half a perm and her face all smudged clutching a
towel and grabbing hold of people, screaming, You've gorra help me! He's taking
me out tonight, it's me anniversary!

                     
Which might have been
funny if she hadn't been wearing (oh God, oh Jesus Christ) the black bonnet.

                     
Half an hour later, the
rumours are spreading. Some people are saying it's the IRA, and a woman at a
burger stall with its own generator is doing fantastic business and telling one
customer after another, 'It's not just Liverpool, you know, luv, it's the whole
country that's been blacked out! You've had it for hot meals now. Gerrit while
you can!'

                     
It wasn't, of course. It
was just Liverpool, as if that wasn't bad enough and totally unprecedented - a
hundred thousand electricity users cut off for the best part of two hours,
shops and businesses losing millions of pounds.

                     
According to next day's
Daily Post, a spokesman for the National Grid said it had been caused by 'an
outside body'. It was finally traced to the valves on two transformers in the
Lister

Drive
power station at Tuebrook. This is one of the places which passes on the juice
from the National Grid to the local lecky company, MANWEB.

                     
In the DP the following
day, a MANWEB official was quoted as saying it was 'extraordinary' two transformers
going down at once. A 'million to one chance', an 'untimely coincidence'.

                     
And then another unnamed
spokesman actually said, 'The fates came together on this one.'

                     
Interesting, isn't it, that
when official bodies can't explain something, they still revert to expressions
like 'the fates'.

Was it ever actually love
all those years ago? Or Just a subconscious plea for empathy?

      
If it didn't come back to John Lennon, it always came back to
Moira. In the spring of 1981, he'd decided he couldn't stand this
any more
and set out to find her.

      
This meant Scotland. He'd rung all the people he knew up there
- about five of them, mainly musicians. One guy said, yeah, she was certainly
gigging, done some support for Clannad, he was sure she had. Another said, hang
on a mo, there was a line or two in the local rag - Aberdeen University - the
20th, was it?

      
So Dave had loaded up his van with all the clean clothes he
could gather together, thrown an old mattress in the back in case he ran out of
cash. And the Martin guitar, in case he had to sell it, perish the thought.

      
Well, actually, the guitar was also there because of this
little fantasy he had. A darkened folk club somewhere picturesque and atmospheric,
and she'd be doing her act with everybody sitting around quietly, revering her.
And then she'd get on, solo, to a song which really could have used a second
guitar, a few harmonies. She'd be in a long black dress, and when she reached
the chorus she'd sound so alone you could die.

      
At which point...

      
... another guitar, the incomparable Martin, would join in
from the back of the hall, getting louder as the figure from the past weaved
between the bodies towards her, looking as handsome as ever but maybe a little
weary; he'd travelled a long way, after all...

      
Dave still cringed over this.

      
Spring had been late that year. Especially in Scotland.
Snowdrifts in March, the travelling bard, especially in a nine-year-old Ford
Thames. And when he got to Aberdeen University, there was no concert on the
20th involving Moira Cairns.

      
Moira who? She wasn't even that well known. She'd made one
album of her own songs - including The Comb Song - and then gone back to the
traditional folk stuff. She was not famous; she had a
following.
He didn't know about Malcolm Kaufmann in those days;
maybe the agent hadn't yet come on the scene.

      
It was hopeless. She didn't seem to work to any kind of
pattern. Or she knew somehow that he was around.

      
Example. He'd turn up at some pub in, say, a fishing village
in Fife, having spent most of a week on the trail and just enough money left
for a night's B and B, and he'd find it was last night, she'd already been on,
fixture altered by request of the artist.

      
This would keep happening, in different ways. Town halls, theatres,
arts centres, students' unions ... always
last
night, or it had been postponed, or it was the wrong town, or it was the right
town and the bloody van broke down and he arrived too late.

      
All of this happening in a kind of haze, like in those
infuriating dreams where you're trying your damnedest to do something dead simple,
like make a phone call, and your fingers keep hitting the wrong numbers. Each
day he'd set out with the certainty that
this
time ... And each night he'd wind up confused and knackered, getting pissed and
weeping off the quay at Oban or somewhere.

      
She was always ahead of him, always the next town along the line,
and an impenetrable mist between them.

      
Some days he'd climb a hill and stand with his hands spread and
his eyes closed.
Where are you? Just give
me a direction
. Like the way he'd reach out for her mind on stage or during
a session when a song took off on its own.
We
going into the chorus again,

or wind it up?

      
Nothing.

      
And then he'd got ill, running a temperature. Couldn't even
drive home. Lay sweating on the mattress in the back of the van until he must
have passed out or something and the next thing he remembers he's in an ambulance
and then a hospital and someone is saying, Nothing obvious, looks like plain
old nervous exhaustion to me.

      
Next thing, he's sitting up in a cold sweat, throwing off the blankets,
screaming, the Martin!

      
Who is this Martin, Mr Reilly? Is he a friend?

      
The bloody Martin's still in the bloody van!

      
It wasn't, naturally. Fifteen hundred quid's worth of
customized, hand-tooled acoustic guitar. They hadn't taken the van; even
thieves have standards.

      
He'd never been back to Scotland.

OK,
read this carefully. Read it twice.

                     
The official time of the
Liverpool blackout was 1.13 p.m.

                     
It was the thirteenth
minute of the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth
day of December.

                     
Fact.